[iDC] The People Formerly Known as the Employers

(this is a slightly modified version of the original essay, that also
includes links to sources and acknowledgment to the inspiration of
this piece - a long brainstorm session with Leopoldina Fortunati,
here: http://deuze.blogspot.com/2008/10/people-formerly-known-as-employers.html)
The People Formerly Known as the Employers
In 2006, NYU professor Jay Rosen penned an astute observation about
the changing power relationships in the media industries - and more
specifically, the world of journalism - regarding the impact of
internet. His analysis had the catchy title "The People Formerly Known
as the Audience", and pointed towards a shift in access to reporting
tools (news gathering, editing, and publishing) to what used to be
imagined by newsworkers as the audience. Importantly, it is not just
the tools of reporting now being available to "We the Media" (such as
blogging, podcasting, vodcasting, and other forms of social or "our"
media), but also emerging forms of legal protection (Creative Commons
licensing), and increasing uses of users by professional media
organizations, thereby giving the former audience the semi-official
status as competitor-colleagues.
Examples of deliberately turning the media consumer into (co-)
producer across different creative industries are viral and word-of-
mouth (or: "social") marketing, interactive advertising, computer and
videogame modification SDKs (Software Development Kits such as the
Source SDK of Valve), and citizen journalism, where news organizations
indeed call upon their audiences to reconstitute themselves as
journalists - such as Yo Periodista at Spanish newspaper El Pais,
iReport at American broadcaster CNN, and so on.
Flat Hierarchies
At the heart of this argument is the recognition of a new or modified
power relationship between news users and producers, between amateur
and professional journalists. It can be heralded as a democratization
of media access, as an opening up of the conversation society has with
itself, as a way to get more voices heard in an otherwise rather
hierarchical and exclusive public sphere. In this scenario, some of
the traditional and generally uncontested social power of journalists
now flows towards publics, and potentially makes for a flatter
hierarchy in the publication and dissemination of news and information.
By all means, this is an important intervention on the audience side.
But what industry observers like Rosen tend to omit, underreport, or
dismiss is another equally if not more powerful redistribution of
power taking place in the contemporary media ecosystem: a sapping of
economic and cultural power away from professional journalists by what
I like to call The People Formerly known as the Employers. Employers
in the media industries increasingly tend to withdraw from labor, that
is, from taking responsibility for their creative workforce - instead
giving them the feeling - such as in a recent survey among media
workers at Fairfax in Australia - that they are just assets that cost
money.
TPFKATE
Employers in the news industry traditionally offered most of their
workers permanent contracts, included healthcare and other benefits
(at the end of the 20th century sometimes even including maternal
leave), pension plans, and in most cases even provisions sponsoring
reporters to retrain themselves, participate in workshops, and serve
on boards that gave them a formal voice in future planning and
strategies of the firm. Today, most if not all of that has disappeared
- especially when we consider the youngest journalists at work.
Today, the international news industry is contractually governed by
what the International Federation of Journalists euphemistically
describes as "atypical work", which means all kinds of freelance,
casualized, informal, and otherwise contingent labor arrangements that
effectively individualize each and every workers' rights or claims
regarding any of the services offered by employers in the traditional
sense as mentioned. This, in effect, has workers compete for
(projectized, one-off, per-story) jobs rather than employers compete
for (the best, brightest, most talented) employees.
Furthermore, newswork in particularly English, Spanish, and German-
speaking countries gets increasingly outsourced: to subcontracted
temporary workers or even offshored to other countries, where the
People Formerly Known as the Employers practice what has been called
"Remote Control Journalism." Journalists today have to fight with
their employers to keep the little protections they still have, and do
so in a cultural context of declining trust and credibility in the
eyes of audiences (the few "audiences" that still exist given the
Rosen formula), a battle for hearts and minds that they have to wage
without support from those who they traditionally relied on: their
employers.
Powershift
So what we see happening in the context of todays new media ecology
and the emerging global creative economy is power slowly but surely
slipping away from those who we rely on for our entertainment (ex.:
the recent writers' and actor's labor disputes in Canada, India and
the US), our advertising (ex.: the widely reported power shift
occuring in agencies from creative towards account managers, media
planners, and digital consultants), and - perhaps most disturbingly -
our news.
For all the brilliance of those advocating a more democrative media
system, there is generally nothing in their analyses that acknowledges
this erosion of power, this wholesale redistribution of agency away
from those who tend to crave only one thing: creative and editorial
autonomy. No matter how excited I can get about user-generated content
and the collective intelligence of cyberspace, this power shift erodes
the very foundation of the way we know (and thus interact with) the
world, and our ability to truly function in it autonomously, and on
our own terms.
Perhaps we should take this analysis even further: the only way we can
live in the world as this power shift continues, is to rely
exclusively on our own terms. This in turn inevitably leads to mass
solipsism and paranoia - as the only truth we can still believe in has
to be strictly our own, and nothing or nobody can (or should) still be
trusted. It is the perfect storm.
Paraphrasing Zygmunt Bauman: I am writing this down in the hope of
preventing an inevitable disaster.
_____________________________
Mark Deuze
Department of Telecommunications
Indiana University, USA
Professor of Journalism and New Media
Leiden University, Netherlands
mail: mdeuze at indiana.edu
web: deuze.blogspot.com
phone: 18126069742
_____________________________